dkirschner's Plants War (Other)

[September 25, 2012 11:41:10 AM]

This is a little MOBA game on my Android. It is free and had high ratings with a ton of reviews. I'm not a big fan of MOBAs mostly due to the communities (a little too competitive and hardcore for me). I tried some LoL and DotA in times past and didn't care for either, even playing with friends. So anyway, I figured I'd try this highly rated single player one.

Verdict: It's fun enough for a while, but falls into one of the traps that other MOBAs fall into with me. It gets hella repetitive. Every match, same skills, same build order, same creeps spawning, same pushing, same same same. And in this game, the map is the same every time up to where I'm at (level 16 on Normal), which is halfway through the map. So I don't expect it to change. The differences are that each team has two towers instead of one now (maybe they ramp to three later) and the enemy periodically upgrades its hero and creeps. Every time it upgrades the hero, I get a grudge against it because it's noticeably harder. Right now I'm cursing "Damn polar bear!" Before that it was "Stupid penguin!"

So the key is to get boss kills. Their hero inevitably runs away when it takes damage, and you can't chase it down because the towers will kill you/the hero will heal and then turn around and kill you with the towers. But if you can chain some special attacks on the hero, you can get him down. You can also work the space by walling him behind some creeps so he can't take a straight line back to heal. This is great because heroes stay dead for like 30 seconds, which is more often than not enough time to push forward and kill a tower.

You can upgrade your own hero and creeps with gold that you receive after battles. There's another currency, leaves, that are really rare, but you need them to unlock stuff. That's where they get people at the cash shop I suppose. Basically, upgrades are few and far between. The last time I played just now I finally got a different hero, my second one, who is much stronger and has some different special attacks. I have like 4 different creeps, one tank-like one, one ranged one, and a couple regular melee ones. Since upgrading is so expensive, it contributes to the samey feeling of the game. And since the computer upgrades far more frequently (4 times now to my 2!) it definitely gets harder. But it also begins to feel unfair. Their creeps spawn at least twice as fast as mine now, or at least twice as many. I'm constantly outnumbered, which gets annoying because I end up getting walled in. That's supposed to be my trick, not theirs! Except they don't do it on purpose. They just bunch up around me and I can't go where I want and end up being shot to death.